Technology and the occasional justified rant

I’ve never been one for new year resolutions. Every year I say to myself that I’ll eat better, cut down on sugar in my tea, crisps, cakes and chocolate, and exercise more, but it usually lasts about half a day.

This year (and I mean 2013) I have made one resolution that I already started last week and stuck to yesterday… to give up Foursquare. I’m not closing my account, I’m just giving up on checking in at every place I go. This has bordered on obsession at times, mainly in the cause of collecting badges and getting to the top of the leader board (which often translates as being ahead of Andy Piper). And also trying to better my weekly score – this peaked recently at 341, but to get a score like that you have to be almost obsessed. It means checking in at every shop I go into, every individual train platform, and being the mayor of many places (currently over forty). I realised I’ll probably never beat that.

Constantly checking in drains the phone battery, and I’ll even admit that I’ve missed a couple of trains at Clapham Junction (platform 12 is an infamous 3G void) as I’ve waited to get a signal. Luckily there’s always another train to Victoria within five minutes, and as they’re usually four minutes late I often catch the train I intended to anyway. Oh, and Mrs A finds it annoying, which isn’t a good thing.

With all this in mind I’m giving up on day-to-day Foursquare check-ins. I’ll leave you with two things. The first, my hilarious Foursquare joke tweeted in July 2012…

My wife said I'm an idiot who's obsessed with foursquare. I ask you, is that any way to speak to the mayor of our road?

And secondly, a quick laugh at the concept of ‘specials’. These change from time-to-time, but I recall a special for a well-known pizza outlet near us. If you were the mayor, you could ask for a 10% discount. It’s difficult enough ordering a pizza in there, conversing with someone who barely speaks English. The idea of saying “hello, I’m the mayor of this pizza outlet, I’d like a 10% discount please”… yeah, right.

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Darren

Darren Adams works for Microsoft as a Global Account Technology Strategist. In a former life he worked for the Lotus brand within IBM for many years. Married with one daughter and two dogs, lives in Camberley (Surrey, England), and plays the guitar badly. That's it really.